Cambodia`s central bank has performed trials for interbank payments, while using blockchain technology.

The National Bank of Cambodia (NBC) announced its collaborative efforts with Japanese technology company and blockchain specialist Soramitsu in April this year, as the article noted. The project is reportedly aimed at designing a cashless payment system for the citizens of Cambodia.

Soramitsu is best known for one of its services, the Iroha blockchain platform. The latter relies on smart contracts and functions as a ledger that allows permissioned parties to transact at scale 1000x to that of bitcoin, as the Japanese developer explained as quoted by cryptocoinnews.com. Iroha is part of the Hyperledger project that is under the leadership of the Linux Foundation.

NBC director-general Chea Serey spoke to The Phom Penh Post (phompenhpost.com) and said that the technology will not be used to support any type of cryptocurrency. It is to be employed to reduce the costs of interbank lending, as she added.

“We expect the new technology to provide smooth, efficient, safe and affordable interbank transactions which will ultimately benefit end users.”, as she wrote in an email.

“At this stage we will focus on the operational functionality of the system, but we believe the system can further be customized with application development to benefit the [central] bank’s monetary policy, including the use of the local currency.”, as she elaborated.

It is difficult to support commercial banking at scale in Cambodia, as cryptocoinnews.com speculated. The country`s monetary policy is influenced by the US dollar. Therefore, it is opinionated that the blockchain technology may be a solution for Cambodia.

“A cashless system is less costly and more transparent for the whole economy. This has always been on our agenda, but we needed time to study the different platforms available [before taking a call].”, as the central bank official reportedly explained.

It is to be seen how (if at all) this idea will be realized in the future.